A blog about individual and community development using new information and communication technologies, especially e-learning, open educational resources, open source, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, semantic web and other social software.

2016-07-29

Like higher education, most K-12 platform deployments are examples of 'technology integration' rather than transformation. They facilitate textbook replacement and open content utilization. Strong deployment support personalization and extend learning.

2016-07-25

Augmented reality could open up huge potential for education outside of the classroom and enable students to learn and interact with whatever is in their immediate physical environment at any particular time. It could also transform publishing and the way we interact with books and images by enabling us to transform them into interactive multimedia.

2016-07-23

With so much information readily available in a range of multimodal formats, from text to multimedia, apps and social networking, we need to blend technological learning and critical literacy together so that students can critically appraise the information that they are accessing.

A transition, quietly but most assuredly, has occurred: Today, in 2016, discussions under the heading "mobile learning" are becoming more about how "all-the-time, everywhere learning" can be supported with "mobile" technology than about mobile devices and apps. That transition has huge pedagogical implications!

2016-07-22

Getting started with something new is usually a challenging and time-consuming task. Traditionally, you need to bury your nose in books. It sounds boring. However, on the Internet it takes a whole new turn. With numerous online educational programs, things begin to look more pleasant and enjoyable. You can quickly grasp the solution and remain in a positive mood. It is not surprising that online learning has doubled in popularity and has become a real trend.

You can find certified tutors for different issues: there are walkthroughs for everyone and everything from knitting a sweater to 'cooking' a fully working mobile application. You can mature as a specialist or taste a brand-new field. The great thing is that real experts are involved. Not only do they explain techniques and basics but also share their precious experience and even reveal their secrets.

2016-07-14

By Starr Sackstein, NBCT Student learning can sometimes get lost in moments as teachers work with individual groups or one-on-one with a single student. Although the one student or few students win, the others are often left behind.

VideoNot.es is a great tool for building your students' digital literacies and their abilities to use video to study online. It enables students to take time stamped notes while they watch video content and save them alongside the video file.

We're on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity -- and it's not human. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results: spectacular, hallucinatory collages (and poems!) that defy categorization. "Perception and creativity are very intimately connected," Agüera y Arcas says. "Any creature, any being that is able to do perceptual acts is also able to create."

2016-07-06

The problem with universal access to technology is the fact that it provides almost unrestricted access to information. Much of this information is fantastic and can give a real boost to the learning experience. The danger exists where there is mis-information, inaccuracies and worst of all information that might promote prejudice, discrimination, hatred and violence.

2016-07-05

By Bethany Petty The classrooms of today have the potential to look vastly different than those of the past. Many teachers have access to a vast array of technology tools that can be used in the classroom to increase student engagement.

2016-07-04

One of the unique aspects of the e-learning industry is how often it changes and how quickly you have to adapt to that change. Regardless of your background, education, or professional experience, becoming a better e-learning designer requires a willingness to learn new things.

In recent free webinar on the 10 Lessons Learned My First Year in E-Learning, I talked about my realization that the field of e-learning is so much more than just the practice of instructional design. Becoming a better e-learning designer required me to learn the subtlety of graphic design, the art of visual communications, the technical aspects of user interface design, and much more! Instructional design was just one piece of a larger skillset that I needed to master.